Power supply problems overcome by October 2010 : Minister

Antara News, Tuesday, January 5, 2010 00:05 WIB | Economic & Business

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - The electricity supply problems in a number of regions in Indonesia will be overcome by October 2010, Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Hatta Radjasa said here on Monday.

"Outages in a number of regions will be overcome in the next 10 months," he said in his evaluation of economic performance in 2009 and prospects for 2010.

He said the state electricity company PLN would take steps to overcome electricity crisis in several regions by among others continuing the purchase of excess power of other companies.

In terms of finance, he said, the government would improve PLN's finance by increasing its funding to reach Rp30 trillion.

The additional funding would be taken from the increasing margin from formerly five percent against the principle production cost (BPP) to eight percent.

With the BPP in 2009 reaching Rp140 trillion an increase of one percent in margin would need Rp11.2 trillion.

By increasing the margin from five to eight percent it means PLN's margin would increase from Rp7 trillion to Rp11.2 trillion.

"Based on one percent increase in margin PLN will be able to borrow up to Rp7 trillion and so with an increase of three percent PLN's debt capacity will reach Rp21 trillion," he said.

The rest, he said, would be covered with the government's capital participation totalling Rp10 trillion.

"The additional Rp30 trillion funds will make PLN healthy and at the same time able to overcome outages this year," he said.

As the government will not raise the electricity tariff the increased margin would be covered by subsidy hike. "We will discuss it with the House of Representatives," he said.

PLN recorded by October 2009 11 of 24 national electricity systems suffered a deficit of power by 460.2MW.Only two systems under normal conditions and 11 others are on alert, he said.

He said PLN categorizes its power system into three namely normal when no outage occurs and operational reserves are bigger than the biggest unit of generators, alert when no outage occurs but the potential is there because operational reserves are smaller than the biggest unit of generators and then deficit when outages occur because power is smaller than the peak burden or transmission system is disrupted.

Eleven systems detected to suffer a deficit are the southern part of Sumatra (198.3 MW), South Sulawesi (145.7 MW), the northern part of Sumatra (70MW), Minahasa (27.51 MW), Tanjung Pinang (7.4 MW), Palu (5.96 MW), Kendari (2.1 MW), Poso (1.71 MW), Sampit (0.8 MW), Ambon (0.56 MW) and Singkawang (0.16 MW).

The systems that are normal are the Java-Bali and Bontang while the systems under alert are Bangka, Belitung, Batam, Pontianak, Lombok, Barito, Mahakam, Gorontalo, Kupang, Ternate and Jayapura.